When I was 14, my mother took me to a dermatologist to have the row of warts on my right middle finger permanently removed. Two treatments were available. The doctor recommended the more costly, which would leave my hand unblemished. The less expensive option, burning the warts with liquid nitrogen,...

The following spring she moved outdoors. She cleared the chaos of overgrowth, trucking the debris to a composting facility on the outskirts of town. Determined to give the house the perfectly flat front lawn she had pictured as the ideal complement to its architectural starkness, she began to dig, removing...

Like most girls born circa 1960, my sister and I were raised to want two things in life: a husband and a house, in that order. So pervasive was this expectation among the members of our middle-class, third-generation-American cohort that it did not even have to be spoken. The message...